Alone on the Wall: Alex Honnold and the Ultimate Limits of Adventure (8 page)

The Adršpach and Elbsandsteingebirge thrust out of the forest along the river Elbe, southeast of Dresden, in a wild burst of dark gray pinnacles. There, during the first two decades of the twentieth century, a cadre of hard men whose climbing culture was utterly insulated even from their peers in the Alps put up the most difficult rock routes anywhere in the world. As they did so, they developed a local style bound by ironclad “ethics” unlike that of any other scene.

Americans and Western Europeans discovered the Dresden arena only in the late 1960s, and when some of the best outsiders ventured there to sample that scene, they were uniformly impressed—and intimidated. By 2008, some forty years later, the purism of the eastern German and Czech locals still ruled the crags. In the Elbsandsteingebirge, big ring bolts, drilled frighteningly far apart (as much as twenty or thirty meters), form the only fixed anchors and protection. Pitons, nuts, and cams are not allowed. The only removable protection a climber is allowed to place is knotted nylon slings jammed into cracks—a practice with which American, French, and Swiss climbers were wholly unfamiliar. To make matters worse—or purer—chalk for the fingers is not allowed. Lacking decent rock shoes, the Dresden climbers put up many of their hardest routes barefoot.

Mortimer and Rosen rounded up their team of American rock stars, including Cedar Wright, Renan Ozturk, Matt Segal, Topher Donahue, and Heidi Wirtz. Alex went along as the promising rookie. For the film, the directors lured sixty-one-year-old Bernd Arnold—the grandmaster of the Elbsandsteingebirge from the late 1960s through the ’70s and ’80s—to act as guide for the awestruck Americans. In the film, although Arnold speaks virtually no English, he gleefully shows his charges the ropes (as it were), encouraging them
to take off their shoes and scramble barefoot to get used to the strange rock. Arnold’s comrades blithely underscore the seriousness of the routes with gallows humor. As one of them says, in accented English, “If you fall, you can become legend.”

The climactic scene of this episode in
The Sharp End
unfolds after the Americans have succeeded on some of the classic routes but now want to make their own mark to salvage a bit of pride. They gather beneath a sharp vertical arête, a route that even the locals declare too dangerous. The talk is ominous and fearful. Wearing a hoodie, looking like the antisocial nerd Ben Smalley remembered from high school, Alex is almost silent. But then he quietly spouts, “We’ve been here for an hour, talking about how hard and how scary this is. We should just go do it.”

So Alex takes the sharp end. His progress up the terrifying arête, superbly filmed, uses his buddies’ spontaneous comments as voice-over. Cedar Wright says, “He’s hesitating there for ten minutes. He’s looking at a ninety-foot fall. He could hit the ground.” In the film, you can hear Alex’s short bursts of panting breath. But the smooth, exquisitely calculated movement is a work of art. Fear for his safety transmutes into his comrades’ praise. “Watching Alex is pretty inspiring,” one says, “because he keeps it together so well.” Another: “Alex is in a different head space—his ability to stay calm and not get pumped, all the way to the top.” And after Alex finishes the climb, yet another: “That’s not a pitch I want to lead.” Cedar Wright: “I’m definitely a little jealous.”

Wordless, Alex stands on the summit of the spire and grins.

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After Alex free soloed Half Dome in September 2008, Mortimer and Rosen decided they wanted to shape a whole film around the prodigy’s extraordinary deeds. But no one had witnessed Alex’s climbs on either Moonlight Buttress or Half Dome. The solution
was self-evident: approach Alex and ask him whether he’d be willing to reenact passages on those two routes for the camera.

Mortimer remembers, “He wasn’t reluctant at all. He was up for it. ‘Yeah,’ he told us, ‘I love the idea of getting some footage on those walls.’”

The logistical problems of filming that footage, however, were monumental. By the spring of 2009, when Sender was ready to shoot Moonlight Buttress, there were several parties on the route, climbing it in old-fashioned style, with plenty of aid. Fortunately, those parties were toiling low on the route. Mortimer and still photographer Celin Serbo decided to rappel down some 400 feet from the summit, hang on parallel ropes, then film and photograph Alex free soloing the upper pitches close up with the aid parties well out of the frame. Alex would rappel down those 400 feet, take off his harness, and start soloing upward.

Mortimer had deep misgivings about what he was asking Alex to do.
What if he falls to his death
, he worried,
just for the sake of our film? I can’t imagine how I could live with that.
His film crew was equally apprehensive. “As we gathered in Springdale the night before the reenactment,” Mortimer says, “we were completely stressed out. We were at a pizza parlor. We waited until Alex went to the bathroom, then we said to each other, ‘I don’t know if we should do this.’

“When Alex came back, I started to ask, ‘Alex, are you sure—?’

“He burst out, ‘You guys are such pussies! You mean I’ll have to call someone else to shoot this?’”

The passages Alex soloed for the camera were the 5.12 pitches above the crux 180-foot inside corner, where a perfect finger crack into which he locked his first digits had given him such exhilaration when he’d first soloed the route the previous April. Mortimer: “It was cold. And it was windy. The exposure up there at the top of Moonlight Buttress is crazy. It’s as vertigo-inducing as anything on El Cap. While we filmed, just a few feet away from Alex, we were
super careful not to move an inch, so as not to distract him. You don’t want to drop a lens cap or knock loose even the tiniest stone.”

Even so, Mortimer and his cameramen were gripped. The finger-locked digits, the feet pasted flat against the smooth wall, seemed to give Alex only the most marginal purchase on the world. Below him stretched an 800-foot void. If he fell, he might strike nothing before slamming into the ground at the base of the wall. At that moment, Alex turned to the camera and said, “So, do you want me to make this look like it’s hard for me?” According to Mortimer, “Alex was actually thinking, ‘Oh, those guys must be so bored.’” A little later, Alex jammed his knee into a crack, then suddenly let go with both hands. “No hands kneebar, baby!” he exulted.

A few months later, a slightly different crew, including Mortimer’s directing partner Nick Rosen and cameraman Tim Kemple, gathered to shoot Alex reenacting parts of the Regular Northwest Face route on Half Dome. In the interim, two of America’s best mountaineers, Johnny Copp and Micah Dash (both featured in
The Sharp End
, as they explored the Shafat Fortress in India and the Chamonix
aiguilles
in France), disappeared on Mount Edgar in western China, along with cinematographer Wade Johnson, who had worked on
The Sharp End
. Living in Boulder, all three were close friends of the entire staff of Sender Films. Not only that, but Sender was crafting a film around the attempt on the massive, unclimbed southeast face of Mount Edgar.

It was only when the trio missed a return flight out of Chengdu that a rescue effort was launched. Top climbers from Boulder and elsewhere, including Nick Rosen, immediately flew to China to initiate a search. They were aided by Chinese troops. On June 7, 2009, Copp’s body was found at the base of the wall, Johnson’s the next day. It seemed clear that a gigantic avalanche of mixed rock, snow, and ice had scoured the wall, engulfing the climbers. Dash’s body was never found.

Remarkably, much of Johnson’s footage was recovered intact at base camp. Mortimer and Rosen used it to put together a film in homage to their friends.
Point of No Return
is a haunting, unforgettable work. Knowing the tragic fate that awaits the three young climbers, you watch their tearful goodbyes to girlfriends at the airport, their boisterous antics at base camp, with a sense of mounting dread. But you also see the monstrously scary, nearly continuous barrage of falling rocks and ice that had made the trio decide to abandon the route even before coming to grips with it.

It’s torturous to learn that the men’s final mission was simply a scramble up to a cache above base camp to retrieve equipment they had stowed a few days before. Watching them head off to their doom, you want to scream at the screen,
Just go home! Leave the fucking gear!

In the wake of the disaster, which shook the whole American climbing community, Mortimer and Rosen approached Half Dome with Alex in a somber, even psyched-out mood. “We had absolutely no stomach,” says Mortimer, “for anything crazy or on the edge. We were going to restrict the filming to the easier pitches down low, then rap down a few hundred feet from the summit to film Alex finishing the Zig-Zags and traversing Thank God Ledge.”

Despite the fears and sorrows of the filmmakers,
Alone on the Wall
comes across as a blithe celebration of climbing; it’s even lighthearted in places. The film is a minor masterpiece. No one can watch it, even for the fourth or fifth time, without feeling palms turn sweaty as Alex performs his ropeless dance on vertical rock. And the film never fails to inspire a heated debate among climbers and nonclimbers alike over the ethics of free soloing. (Some nonclimbers simply cannot bear to watch the film.)

A testament to Mortimer and Rosen’s cinematic skill lies in the fact that most viewers don’t realize they’re seeing a reenactment. Instead, the film looks and feels like a documentary of two
of the boldest exploits of twenty-first-century climbing. For comic counterpoint, the film intercuts the footage on Moonlight Buttress and Half Dome with Alex giving a tour of the Econoline van that serves as his home (narrator Rosen: “Do you have girls in here a lot?” Alex, guffawing: “Do I look like I have girls in here a lot?”), and with a visit to Alex’s childhood home in Sacramento, where his mother proudly shows off all the magazine covers featuring her son, while he cringes in embarrassment. The film closes lightheartedly, too, with Alex eating food out of a bowl with a twig in lieu of cutlery, as he riffs about being like a tool-using chimp using a stick to ferret out ants. “This is what makes us human,” he cracks.

The heart of
Alone on the Wall
, of course, lies in the dazzling footage of Alex on his two big walls. Interspersed with this action are sound bites from Alex’s peers. Says Cedar Wright, one of Alex’s best friends, “When you meet Alex Honnold, you’re gonna be like, ‘Huh, this guy is a bumbling, dorky, awkward goofball.’ Until he steps on the rock, and then he’s literally a whole other person. He becomes this poised, graceful, calculated badass dude.” John Long, the Stonemaster who shared in the first one-day ascent of the Nose on El Cap in 1975, marvels about Alex’s free solo of Half Dome: “It took some vision to get up there, but it took some frickin’
balls
to actually do it.” Climbing buddy Nick Martino declares, “Frickin’ Honnold is walking on the moon, as far as I’m concerned.”

As the footage of the actual climbing spools by, Alex comments in voice-over: “There’s all the little things you have to think about, like left-right, which sequence you’re doing, but there’s nothing I’m really thinking about—I’m just doing it.” And: “I love the simplicity of soloing. You never climb better than when you’re soloing.” And: “Doubt is the biggest danger in soloing. As soon as you hesitate, you’re screwed.” But even Alex seems at last to realize the magnitude of his deeds, as, standing on the summit of Moonlight Buttress, grinning with happiness, he utters, “When I think about it, it’s frickin’ rad!”

The climax of the film dramatizes the stall-out that gave Alex his five minutes of “very private hell” only 150 feet below the top of Half Dome. But Mortimer and Rosen were not about to ask Alex to repeat that terrifying sequence of “miserly smears” on the 5.12 slab above Thank God Ledge, where, on September 6, 2008, he had confronted the very real possibility of falling almost 2,000 feet to his death. Instead, in the film, Thank God Ledge itself serves as the locus for the freakout. As Alex sidles carefully away from the camera along the narrowing ledge, facing out with his back to the wall, he pauses. In voice-over, he narrates, “Basically, when I’m soloing, normally I have like a mental armor. You could say I’m in the zone. Something that’s protecting my head from thinking too much. And for some reason”—he laughs at the memory—“on Half Dome I ran out of what armor I had. . . . I had a mini-nervous breakdown.”

In the film, the invisible cameraman, Tim Kemple, tells Alex that he can traverse back to safety if he doesn’t like the feel of this predicament. But Alex shuffles on—across ground that in reality was fairly easy for him. And then, soon, he’s bounding across the summit, alone in his joy.

In only six years, that moment of film footage on Thank God Ledge became one of the most iconic images in climbing history. Sender Films put a still from the sequence on the cover of their boxed set
First Ascent
, which contains four other films besides
Alone on the Wall
and
Point of No Return
. A couple of years later, in its May 2011 issue,
National Geographic
ran a feature on the younger generation of Yosemite hotshots, for which photographer Jimmy Chin duplicated the shot. It made the cover of the magazine. In the 2014 Ball Watch ad, yet another version of Alex on Thank God Ledge illustrated the “truly adverse conditions” facing “the world’s explorers.”

Within the last year and a half, that image has spawned a craze of imitations, under the rubric “Honnolding,” as climbers pose on their
own ledges (much closer to the ground), their backs to the wall, feet together, arms stiff at their sides, blank looks on their faces—as well as a number of goofy parodies, in which subjects assume the same pose standing on toilet tanks, refrigerators, stepladders, and the like. The only comparable phenomenon in recent years was the vogue of Tebowing—kneeling in prayer, one knee on the ground, elbow on the other knee, closed hand pressed to bent forehead—in homage to the born-again NFL quarterback. After Tim Tebow moved off the field and on to ESPN, however, that craze waned fast.